(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Which Democrats are Serious and Un-Serious About Trade Overhaul?

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AFL-CIO, Bernie Sanders, Canada, Charles Schumer, currency manipulation, Debbie Dingell, Democrats, dispute resolution, Elizabeth Warren, environmental standards, labor standards, Mexico, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, Politico, Richard Neal, Robert Lighthizer, Rosa deLauro, rules of origin, Thea Lee, Trade, Trump, U.S. Trade Representative, unions, Wilbur Ross, William Pascrell, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Usually, paying attention to instances of politicians and other public figures getting up on their soapboxes is a waste of time. Yesterday served up an exception: a press conference held by House Democrats in reaction to President Trump’s official decision to open talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The statements recorded in this Politico account offer some evidence as to which leaders on America’s Left are willing to work with the administration on trade policies that can help the working class voters Democrats still profess to champion, and those who will remain content to sit on the sidelines and take partisan potshots.

Reportedly, all of the House members who spoke at the event “said…they feared Trump would make only modest changes to NAFTA after blasting it as an economic disaster throughout last year’s presidential campaign.” The basis for these worries? The letter sent yesterday by new U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to Congressional leaders announcing the administration’s intention to open NAFTA talks with the two other signatories, Canada and Mexico. According to these House Democrats and some other trade critics, the document apparently was “short on details,” which many claimed indicated Trump’s intention simply to “tweak” rather than comprehensively overhaul the agreement.

All else equal, wondering about the president’s real intentions is anything but unreasonable. His personality, after all, is mercurial, and one of his major trade initiatives to date – the negotiations begun with Beijing following February’s summit with Chinese leader XiJinping – has legitimately disappointed advocates of the major course change he pledged during the campaign. (The other major trade initiative, scrapping the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, kept a leading campaign promise to the letter.) Moreover, the Lighthizer letter is indeed short on specifics.

But none of the participants in the press conference seems to have noticed that in previous statements –including reportedly to leading Democratic lawmakers, top Trump officials have emphasized the need for dramatic NAFTA changes.

For example, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has described as high NAFTA-related priorities greatly tightening the pact’s rules of origin in order to incentivize more non-NAFTA manufacturing investment inside the free trade zone, and restructuring a dispute-resolution system that gives each signatory an equal vote even though the United States represents more than 85 percent of North America’s total economic output. Reinforcing this point was the Lighthizer letter’s contention that “establishing effective implementation and aggressive enforcement of the commitments made by our trading partners under our trade agreements is vital to the success of these agreements and should be improved in the context of NAFTA.”

Meanwhile, Lighthizer reportedly has told Senators that the administration is thinking of adding to NAFTA rules that would prohibit currency manipulation – a move that would set a valuable precedent for future trade deals. In addition, his letter mentioned the need to improve NAFTA’s labor and environmental protections. In my view, they’re largely unenforceable. But they’ve been a prime focus of Democratic Party trade policy positions for decades.

So given that background, it seems fair at this point to finger Connecticut’s Rosa deLauro, New Jersey’s Bill Pascrell, and Massachusetts’ Richard Neal as grandstanders. The former stressed the “tweaking” allegation. The latter two charged that “It was clear from the start that the administration was only interested in working with the Congressional Republican leadership in drafting this notice [the Lighthizer letter].”

I’d also include in this group several key Senate Democrats, including Leader Charles Schumer of New York, former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders of New York, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. They voted against Lighthizer’s confirmation despite his decades-long record of fighting predatory foreign trade practices both as Deputy U.S. Trade Representative during the Reagan administration, and as a trade lawyer representing domestic American producers.

More temperate in their judgments were Michigan’s Debbie Dingell, and the AFL-CIO’s Thea Lee. The former stated that she was “investing the time to understand where the consensus is.” The latter said, “We enter every negotiation in a good faith state of mind and we expect a lot from our government. Certainly candidate Trump made a lot of promises about fixing flawed trade agreements and looking out for American workers and good jobs, so we will hold him and his administration to that promise.”

I can’t think of a more reasonable position for politicians and other supporters of a movement that still styles itself as the “party of the common man [and woman].”

Im-Politic: Why U.S. Progressives Need to Become Nationalists

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America First, Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, free trade agreements, globalism, Im-Politic, Immigration, labor unions, nationalism, New Balance, offshoring, Populism, progressives, third world, Trade, Trump, white working class, working class

Tiny groups of individuals shouldn’t be mistaken for entire movements, or even significant factions of movements. Therefore, I don’t want to make too much of those Trump haters who burned their New Balance sneakers and/or slammed the company on social media because it stated that the election as president of a strong trade policy critic would be good for manufacturers seeking to make most of their products in the United States, like itself.

At the same time, the backlash against New Balance sheds lots of light on serious problems in the ranks of American progressivism that contributed to Trump’s triumph and that will need to be solved if the Left end of the country’s political spectrum is to win working class loyalties and convincingly claim populist chops.

Let me start with a little story (one of my father’s favorite phrases!). Back in the late-1990s, when President Clinton had requested new trade negotiating authority from Congress, I attended a meeting at AFL-CIO headquarters of activists seeking to block his ambitions. Early at the session, we agreed that we should explain to legislators and the public what kinds of trade policies we favored, not simply what we opposed, and someone (not me) suggested something along these lines as a unifying theme:

“The main purpose of U.S. trade policy should be to promote healthy growth for the American economy and higher living standards for the majority of the American people.”

That didn’t seem terribly controversial to me. But several hands immediately rose in protest. A representative of the Maryknoll Sisters made clear the objection. Why, she asked, were we ignoring the well-being of the rest of the world?

To his credit, the American labor leader who was running the meeting tried to argue that, however much he sympathized with her point, it was axiomatic that the first obligation of the U.S. government was to promote and defend the interests of the American people. But he didn’t make the argument very emphatically, and many of the others around the table – who came from left-of-center organizations – were even more conflicted. I tried to shore up the first speaker, but quickly realized I was in the greatly outnumbered and spent the rest of the session listening.

I don’t remember what the final version said, and doubt it was ever made public, but the phrasing of that opening point was definitely watered down. On my way out, some folks who worked for labor union offices outside the Beltway came over to me and asked, as they were shaking their heads, “What the heck was that all about?” I replied, “You’ve just learned a valuable lesson about American liberals. Many don’t believe that American workers’ interests should come first.”

They’d actually gotten many such lessons throughout the 1990s. As the first Bush administration and especially the Clinton administration turned U.S. trade policy into an exercise in offshoring, not domestic growth, their progressive critics decided that the best way to resist was to spotlight the harm this new strategy would inflict on workers and peasants in the developing world as well as in the United States. In fact, the third world and its grievances turned into a prime focus of those who famously protested the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle.

This approach made some tactical sense, as many liberals in Congress clearly were not constitutionally inclined to buy an America First trade policy. But although there are any number of ways in which U.S. trade policies could be changed to create more situations of mutual benefit between rich and poor countries (see this recent article for an example), the progressive stance also reflected a refusal to recognize that many hard choices have confronted – and still confront – the nation on trade.

In public policy trying to please everyone tends to wind up pleasing no one. So substantively, this wishful thinking was a formula for confusion at best. Politically, the impact was far worse: The progressives wound up muddying and therefore weakening the message trade critics were trying to send to the public.

Small wonder that even though the critics won some procedural trade fights during the 2000s, even after the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, President Obama managed to secure Congressional passage of three new free trade agreements. Not until a major politician forthrightly vowed to prioritize American interests in trade policy making did the powerful globalization status quo meet its match – and then some.

Based on their initial post-election statements, it seems that progressive leaders realize that rejecting the option of working with Mr. Trump on trade policy would be the height of folly. That is, it seems that they’re implicitly rejecting the notion that the President-elect is so odious that a company that employs American workers despite powerful pressures to offshore should be condemned not for endorsing the whole of his candidacy, but simply for noting that his election would likely aid those efforts.  Therefore, big changes on the trade front seem inevitable above and beyond the collapse of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.

Yet even the progressives’ leaders still face a towering obstacle in their own quest to regain the votes of the millions of working class voters – probably like many of those New Balance workers – who deserted their party’s standard bearer last Tuesday night. They have no chance of succeeding if they continue describing all forms of common sense immigration policies as bigoted. And for those of you who think that I’m just talking about the white working class, keep in mind that the phrase “union household” also describes this constituency.

In other words, during the 2016 elections, progressives in part tried to convince Main Street America that they would gain from a massive increase in the nation’s supply of unskilled labor through both amnesty and the powerful magnet effect it would generate. And at the same time, if these working class voters worried about the resulting downward pressure on wages, along with the effects on the nation’s cohesion of surging bilingualism and its security of newcomers from the culturally medieval Middle East, they were condemned by the Left as nativists, racists, and even worse.

The pointed references to Mr. Trump’s alleged xenophobia by both Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (earlier in the campaign) show that their faction of American politics has much to learn on this score. Until they understand that real U.S. populists can’t be globalists in this day and age, they’re likely to continue wandering the political wilderness.

Im-Politic: The Day After, Part II

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2016 election, African Americans, Bernie Sanders, consumer confidence, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, exit polls, Hillary Clinton, Hispanics, Im-Politic, labor, NAFTA, polls, TPP, Trade, trade laws, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump, white working class

It’s the day after the day after in America, and I’m still stupefied by the advent of the Age of Trump. I have absolutely no inside info on what to expect in the way of policy recommendations from the transition team or the new administration, so I’ll be just as eager as anyone for the hints and trial balloons to emerge.

But continuing with the theme of yesterday’s post, I believe it is possible to identify some important questions that major actors in American politics – and the voters they’ll keep trying to reach – will need to grapple with. Let’s focus today on the Democrats and their allies and constituencies, since they face the most obvious challenges:

>At least one piece of the conventional wisdom about Hillary Clinton’s failings strikes me as being right on target – especially since the emails exposed by Wikileaks make clear that her senior advisers spotted it as well: She never developed a clear, compelling positive message.

It’s not that “Stronger together” isn’t a positive idea, and no doubt had some appeal at a time of deep national division. But this slogan begs the question “Stronger together to where?” Regularly, Clinton suggested that she meant “to the 1990s,” when her husband was president. Many Americans – particularly in the chattering classes – do indeed view the period as a time of unprecedented prosperity along with peace. To many others, however – especially in working class precincts – the decade evoked memories of job-killing trade agreements like NAFTA. And of course many others were reminded of a string of scandals, both real and alleged.

In fact, I’d take the critique of Clinton’s message one step further. Even though her campaign website and many of her speeches were filled with any number of specific proposals, they were quickly replaced on the campaign trail, and especially in her ads, by a non-stop assault on Trump’s character and qualifications for the Oval Office. Clinton’s defeat strongly indicates that you can’t beat even a deeply flawed something with nothing.

>In fairness to Clinton, however, her messaging problems might have been related to a genuine quandary she faced. Democrats have styled themselves, and often acted like, the Party of the Common Man. As I and others have written, when it comes to issues like trade, demographic changes in Democrats’ ranks seem to be clashing with this relatively populist identity, and Tuesday night’s results indisputably show that the party has the majority of the white working class.

Indeed, according to the preliminary evidence, Clinton’s performance among union voters was feeble by the standards of recent Democratic presidential candidates – despite labor leaders’ vehement opposition to Trump. And keep in mind that nearly half of this electoral bloc is comprised of government workers, who naturally tend to favor the freer spending Democrats. As a result, Clinton’s backing from members of private sector unions was probably much weaker still.

So the Democrats face a fundamental choice, and it could well have rhetorically crippled an undecided Clinton. Will they turn their backs on private sector union members, possibly also in the belief that America’s changing population profile is steadily reducing their political importance? Or despite the gulf between private sector union workers and younger, better educated Democrats on issues like trade (along perhaps with immigration and those amorphous but crucial cultural and values issues), will they try to bring them back?

>Nonetheless, major Democratic constituencies and their leaders – including the unions and the party’s progressive wing – still loudly oppose America’s current approach to trade. But as mentioned above, they’ve been almost hysterically anti-Trump, to the point of incoherence.

If they’re serious about overhauling trade policy, it’s time for these folks to wake up and turn the partisanship down. They’ll soon be getting a president who supports most of their major and longstanding trade positions, including opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), sanctioning China for currency manipulation, rewriting NAFTA, and using U.S. trade law more energetically to fight predatory foreign practices.

Working with Mr. Trump, they can achieve these goals. Remaining in spiteful high dudgeon could doom reforms they’ve sought literally for decades. Statements by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and from organized labor, are promising signs that these progressive leaders are open to cooperation with the incoming Chief Executive. Assuming that these declarations are serious, it’s time for the rest of the movement to fall in line and recognize that for the first time in modern U.S. history, the White House looks to be on their side.

>Finally (for now), nothing could be clearer about the 2016 election returns than the serious flaws they’ve revealed in the so-called science of polling. But politically focused surveys aren’t the only soundings apparently needing major surgery. Many of the best known economic surveys arguably were way off base as well.

For example, many polls – including this week’s exit polls – show strong public support for some form of legalization for illegal immigrants. Can this finding be reconciled with Mr. Trump’s win? Other surveys have revealed a notable warming of Americans’ views of free trade and recent trade agreements. That’s also hard to square with this week’s actual results – and would have been even had Mr. Trump lost by a respectable margin.

Also deserving of greater scrutiny – surveys of consumer and other forms of economic confidence. They have strongly tended to show significant improvement since the depths of the last recession, which isn’t hard to understand. But even their general claims of a simple return to pre-recession levels or, in some cases, better, ring false in light of this week’s voting.

One possible explanation is the gap identified by some researchers between rising optimism by African-Americans and Hispanics and the more downbeat views of whites. But if so, why did Trump fare much better among the latter than widely predicted, and why did he best 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney with both groups even though the economy was considerably weaker four years ago?

I can’t emphasize enough, however, how tentative my observations are, and how long my (and so many other) questions will defy confident answers. My only certainty so far is that election night this week was the most important historic event I’ve ever experienced. (I was born at the end of 1953.) I just wish I knew whether for good or ill.

Im-Politic: The Day After, Part I

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2016 election, Bernie Sanders, Cheap Labor Lobby, conservatism, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jeb Bush, Mainstream Media, Marco Rubio, Obama, offshoring lobby, Open Borders, Paul Ryan, Populism, Republicans, Ross Perot, Ted Cruz, Trade

How did I go wrong on analyzing President-elect Donald Trump’s rise during this epochal presidential campaign? Let me count the ways.

My first post on this populist phenom expressed full confidence that he would never win the Republican presidential nomination – or even “come close.” Although I didn’t explicitly say it, I viewed the idea that he could win the White House as positively ludicrous.

After several of his insult barrages and other verbal bombshells, I was all but certain that his campaign was finished.

I had no doubt that, as with third party presidential candidate and fellow tycoon Ross Perot in 1992, his unwillingness to take advice – especially of the critical kind – would cripple his candidacy. Similarly, I believed that he would run his presidential operation the same way that many successful business leaders engage in politics – incompetently.

So I guess I’m qualified to be a Mainstream Media pundit! But seriously, since I got at least some things right – like translating Trump-ish into language that the chattering class should have been able to grasp – I’m not totally sheepish about serving up a first batch of thoughts about what all Americans either are chewing over or should be in the weeks ahead.

>For all the teeth-gnashing about the ugliness of the presidential campaign, and for all the responsibility for it that Trump deserves, imagine what the race for the White House would have been like without him. The Republicans would have nominated either a tool of the Cheap Labor and Offshoring Lobbies like former Florida Governor Jeb Bush or Florida Senator Marco Rubio, or a social conservative extremist like Texas Senator Ted Cruz. And none of them would have felt major pressure to pay attention to the Republican base’s anger about mass immigration, job- and growth-killing trade deals, or the income stagnation they fostered.

On the Democratic side, this kind of conventional Republican nominee may well have enabled Hillary Clinton to win that party’s crown without many nods to the populist positions taken by her chief rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders – including on trade policy, along with Wall Street reform.

What a clueless – and maybe dangerously clueless – campaign that would have been! In particular, with no political safety valve, the continuing buildup of working- and middle-class rage that both major-party standard-bearers would have kept blithely ignoring could have exploded much more powerfully.

>The Trump victory could be a milestone in not only American politics, but policy. Yet the potential may never become performance unless this most successful outsider in U.S. history meets a staffing challenge that has hung over his campaign since his strength starting being apparent. Specifically, where is he going to find the populist policy specialists and academics and business types and politicians to fill the hundreds of key cabinet and sub-cabinet posts where presidential ambitions can just as easily die a lingering death as produce real, on-the-ground change?

The institutions needed to nurture and train such cadres simply haven’t existed. Or they’ve been way too small (i.e., modestly funded) to produce the needed numbers and possibly the needed quality. After his first White House victory, President Obama dismayed many of his followers by appointing to key economic positions in particular the kinds of Wall Street-friendly Clintonians that he had raked over the coals during that campaign (including Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination that year). His response? As I recall at the time (and I’m still looking for a link), something to the effect “What choice do I have?”

Although Mr. Obama never intended to bring the substantive break with the past that his successor has vowed, Mr. Trump could find himself in the same position, and his administration could drift steadily, and even imperceptibly towards a more conventional, and indeed donor-class-friendly, form of conservatism.

>Finally, for today, the Trump triumph places the Republican party in its current form in just as much jeopardy as a narrow Trump loss.

Had Trump lost in a landslide, the GOP’s future would have been easy to predict: The Never-Trumpian Washington establishment would have loudly crowed, “I told you so,” and advanced an overpowering rationale for returning to its low-tax, small-government, free-trading, open-borders, global interventionist orthodoxy of recent decades.

But last night’s results could be the death knell of establishment Republicanism – at least as a viable political force. It’s entirely possible that this establishment’s corporate and similar funders could decide for the time being to keep afloat the think tanks, media outlets, lobbying shops, and political consultancies comprising the GOP/conservative establishment. Indeed, since Trump could flop disastrously, preserving this infrastructure in preparation for 2020 makes perfect sense.

But for the foreseeable future, this is Donald Trump’s Republican party (whether he has to staff his administration with lots of standard-issue Republicans or not). House Speaker Paul Ryan, who strongly opposes his own party’s president-elect on issues ranging from trade and immigration to entitlement reform to foreign policy, can talk all he wants about reestablishing party unity. But the key question surrounding such calls is always “Unity on whose terms?” Until Mr. Trump fails a major test of leadership (or even two or three), or until events beyond his control render him ineffective (like a weakening economy) he’ll be calling the shots.  

And however lavishly financed the party’s establishment may remain, this election has made painfully obvious that its grassroots are shrunken and browned out. Since one of the prime takeaways of this election cycle is that voters ultimately count even more than money, it will become increasingly difficult even for the donors to treat the Washington Republicans as a true national political movement, as opposed to a self-appointed clique of supposed leaders with embarrassingly few followers.

So there’s of course a chance that the Ryan wing (emboldened by some truly desperate plutocrats) might at some point bolt and try to reclaim the Republican brand as its own or launch a third party. But these well-heeled dissidents will face the strongest of tides with the weakest of paddles – the more so given Ryan’s acknowledgment that Trump’s unexpectedly strong showing helped the GOP retain both houses of Congress. 

Tomorrow I’ll be offering some further initial thoughts. Until then, like so many others, I’ll go back to catching my breath!

Im-Politic: Clinton’s Campaign Sure Thinks the Mainstream Media is “With Her”

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2016 election, ABC News, Bernie Sanders, CBS News, CNN, Donald Trump, Establishment Media, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, media, MSNBC, NBC News, NPR, PBS, The Intercept, The New York Times, Washington Post, Wikileaks

The word “surrogate” is defined in dictionaries as “a substitute, especially a person deputizing for another in a specific role or office.” Now thanks to the Wikileaks disclosures of internal emails and other strategy documents from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, we know that the Democratic candidate and her operatives believed that many members of the Mainstream Media fit that description for her upcoming White House race as well.

According to a memo released by Wikileaks on Friday, and first reported (to my knowledge) on The Intercept website, the list of journalists viewed by the Clinton-ites as reliable conveyors of her message included numerous opinion journalists whose liberal leanings are no secret. Examples include E.J. Dionne, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank, and Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post; and David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, and Gail Collins of The New York Times.

There’s nothing wrong in principle with their presence. There’s no evidence so far that any of them offered their services to the campaign either voluntarily or in response to a request. And unless material comes out indicating active collusion, although surely most are bristling at the suggestion that they’ve been in the tank for anyone in politics, none of these pundits has any control over how they’re viewed by politicians.

But the Clinton characterization of other list members is much more troubling. Dan Balz of the Post isn’t exactly a pure-play columnist – presumably that’s why his employer doesn’t place his pieces on the op-ed page. But his “news analyses” are supposed to occupy some middle ground between opinion and hard news. That concept isn’t necessarily illegitimate. But maybe the Post could clue its readers in on how it views the relevant distinctions, so they could make up their own minds as to how to view these articles?

Another category of listees is problematic, too, but maybe a little less so, since Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Mathews host talk shows on a cable network (MSNBC) that doesn’t try very hard to hide its partisanship. (Similar criticisms of course can be leveled at many of their counterparts on Fox News.)  

Major problems, however, surround the inclusion of news show hosts and anchors who do style themselves as objective journalists. For reasons, I described yesterday, no one should be surprised that ABC News Sunday talk show host George Stephanopoulos is viewed as a Clinton surrogate. But his CBS counterpart John Dickerson? Wolf Blitzer of CNN? Charlie Rose, who does double duty at CBS and PBS?

And scariest of all is the number of listed journalists who present themselves as completely objective beat reporters, like Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Jon King and Jeff Zeleny of CNN, Mara Liasson of NPR, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, and Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post. Moreover, in another memo, the New York Times‘ Maggie Haberman was described as an especially “friendly journalist” who has “never disappointed” the Clinton team with her performance after their promptings.

Since this material dates from spring, 2015, it’s of course nothing more than speculation (however plausible) to venture that Clinton’s operatives have viewed these same journalists as trusted allies in the campaign against her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. (He didn’t declare his candidacy until June.) But the timing is revealing nonetheless because by April, Clinton’s main rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, had thrown his hat into the ring, and it was clear by then that many voters in the party’s left wing were recoiling at the prospect of Clinton as liberalism’s standard-bearer.

As a result, these memos add to the case that much of the national press corps has seen its real mission not as reporting events as objectively as possible, or even as fronting for Democrats, but as defending a center-left status quo against populist challengers of all stripes. Certainly Sanders and many of his backers count themselves as victims.

Fortunately, the only silver lining in this picture is a bright one: Americans’ trust in the mass media to give them the straight news dope is at an all-time low, at least according to Gallup. Undoubtedly that’s a big reason why the establishment media’s finances show signs of weakening across the board. If money really does talk in the ranks of these profit-seeking enterprises, mounting business pressures could push them back to their more responsible roots. Or the Mainstream Media’s owners could arrogantly decide to go down with their ships – in which case the big question will be whether investors more devoted to quality journalism will recognize the vacuum they’ve left.

Im-Politic: Will Sanders and His Backers Become Real Revolutionaries?

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2016 election, Bernie Sanders, Democratic National Committee, Democrats, DNC, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren, emails, Im-Politic, Immigration, leaks, Populism, refugees, Tim Kaine, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Wikileaks

You want a humbling experience? Try coming back from a week-long vacation perfectly timed to coincide with possibly the most tumultuous presidential nominating convention in recent decades! While relaxing on and around the beach in Fenwick Island, Delaware, I generally kept the electronic devices off, and so got only the general drift of events in Cleveland. My efforts to catch up yesterday, moreover, only reinforce my doubts about adding much useful to the latest torrent of news, analysis, and simple bloviation that’s flooded the nation – even though it’s far from clear that much new has been learned, or that many minds have been fundamentally changed.

Thank goodness the latest major development came just as I was returning home: the hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails released by Wikileaks on Friday night. Much has already been written about how angry they are no doubt making Hillary Clinton’s former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders, along with the Vermont Senator’s passionate supporters. 

Much more should and I hope will be written about how the disclosures and their fallout will affect the vast -but largely unrealized – potential that still remains for a grand left-right populist coalition to come together in American politics once this year’s presidential race is over.

The leaked DNC emails put the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party squarely on the spot. Barring major new revelations to the contrary, they’re the most powerful possible injection of salt into Sanders Nation wounds that were rawer than ever over the Democratic platform committee’s refusal to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, and over party standard-bearer Hillary Clinton’s choice of centrist, Big Business-friendly Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate.

Every suspicion held by the Sanders camp that the Democrats’ leadership worked overtime to ensure his defeat – despite the DNC’s own requirement of neutrality – has now been spectacularly confirmed. And who now can reasonably doubt that the DNC was motivated mainly by the threat Sanders’ economic populism posed to its Clinton-friendly donor class?

Donald Trump has made numerous verbal overtures to Sanders and his supporters throughout his successful maverick campaign for the Republican nomination. But no matter how many points of agreement he spotlighted – notably on trade, Wall Street reform, the bloated role of corporate and other special interest money in American politics, and hyper-interventionist U.S. foreign policies – he’s been angrily rebuffed both by the candidate himself and the vast majority of his followers.

Of course, Trump has made this rejection-ism far too easy for the Democratic Left, thanks largely to his inflammatory rhetoric on illegal immigration (especially from Mexico) and a long string of insulting comments both before and during his presidential run about any number of groups and individuals. In addition, serious questions have been raised – and not adequately answered – about Trump’s previous and current business practices. And because Trump’s pugnacious personality seems to rule out any efforts even to acknowledge the resulting concerns, his chances of victory in November have been damaged.

But the emergence of a large, genuinely populist constituency on the Right creates a much thornier longer-term challenge to Sanders Democrats if they’re serious about their avowed goal of revolutionizing American politics: Can they and will they abandon strongly held positions of their own that arguably have hardened into shibboleths and that limit their own bipartisan appeal as surely – and needlessly – as Trump’s excessive political incorrectness? The two biggest tests I can think of concern immigration.

Leftist Democrats have been outraged by Trump’s description, in his campaign kickoff announcement, of at least many Mexican immigrants as criminals. But do they really support the immigration policies laid out in the Democratic platform, which despite its reference to “reasonable limits” on legal immigration, would create powerful magnets to inflows by offering lightly conditioned citizenship to the illegals already in the United States; by streamlining the family reunification process that already fosters far too much chain migration; by gutting even today’s weak enforcement and deportation programs; and by expanding the range of public services made available to residents “regardless of immigration status”?

Do they really believe that pumping up the domestic labor supply to this extent (including with the increases in visa quotas for highly skilled immigrants favored by Clinton and her Silicon Valley backers) will benefit the existing legal American workforce? In other words, do they really believe that handing over current American jobs to a burgeoning flood of newcomers is any less damaging to the nation’s working and middle classes than shipping those jobs overseas through offshoring-friendly trade deals?

Or should they listen to a voice who a decade ago warned that the Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill then before Congress “would bring low-wage workers into this country in order to depress the already declining wages of American workers” and that “With poverty increasing and the middle-class shrinking, we must not force American workers into even more economic distress”?

That voice was Bernie Sanders’, and although he was referring specifically to the bill’s guest worker programs, the economics behind his analysis apply across the immigration board.

Sanders backers also need to reexamine their views on admitting immigrants and refugees from war-torn Middle Eastern countries. Let’s agree that Trump’s original Muslim ban would have been unconstitutional and unworkable. (Even Trump has backed away from this position.) Do they honestly agree with the Obama administration’s insistence that current vetting procedures are adequate? Do they not recognize – as even the president grudgingly but repeatedly has acknowledged – that Islam has presented a distinctive terrorism problem? Indeed, on Thursday, he stated that “the Muslim faith itself…has driven violence in some parts of the world.”

Are they dead-set against acting on the logical implication of Obama’s remarks, and participating in efforts to devise practicable, legal methods for protect their fellow citizens from threats they face from both without and within? Are they determined to self-righteously remain on their soapboxes and condemn as bigots and xenophobes the roughly half of their fellow countrymen who endorse Trump’s fundamental demand to end business-as-usual approaches? And do Sanders’ populists line up behind Clinton’s call actually to make the domestic Islam problem bigger, by quintupling current immigration and refugee admissions from the Middle East?

So far, Trump’s gratuitous bombast has handed Sanders’ backers, as well as supporters of Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, a convenient excuse for opposing immigration proposals that would directly and concretely bolster the prosperity and security of the working and middle-class Americans they claim to champion – and that large chunks of the mass public clearly favor. By the same token, at least apparently in their minds, Trump’s excesses have relieved Democratic Leftists of any responsibility to reach out to their fellow populists on the opposite end of the spectrum, try to bridge the immigration and other gaps, and create a transformational new coalition in American politics.

But Democratic populists can’t count on this excuse much longer. Whoever prevails in the general election, populists of all stripes will need to cooperate to ensure that their unprecedented combined impact this political cycle produces enduring successes. And no current issue touches core questions of economics, national security – and national identity – like immigration. Left-wing Democrats who want to be successful revolutionaries will focus on identifying and expanding common ground, and on working with Trump, his backers, and that group of more conventional, less sharp-edged politicians who decide to proceed down the trail the Republican nominee has blazed. Those content simply to advertise their political virtue while establishment policies continue threatening Main Street Americans will keep demonizing Trump and his insurgency.

Im-Politic: More Political Delusions from the Chattering Class Bubble

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2016 election, Barton Swaim, Bernie Sanders, chattering class, Donald Trump, Im-Politic, polls, RealClearPolitics, Washington Post

It’s always a tough call on any given day to decide which establishment media product deserves the award for “Dumbest (Article/Post/Broadcast) of the Day.” That’s why we all owe a debt of gratitude to someone named Barton Swaim, who for some reason has been selected by the Washington Post as a (regularly) “contributing columnist”. Because his essay this morning titled, “America is off the tracks, but the GOP errs in thinking it can right her” (not exactly catchy, to be sure) is the runaway winner.

The piece performs the impressive feat of making not one but two arguments that clash with reality. The first concerns his apparent belief that only the kinds of Republicans and conservatives who are inclined to support Donald Trump believe that America has (for various reasons) veered onto the “wrong track,” as pollsters like to put it.

Weirdly, Swaim says he agrees with this concern – and in fact, he articulates the conservative version well. But where does he get the idea that the fundamental worry is exclusive to supporters of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee? Or to any faction on the Right? Certainly not from the polls – which, for all their serious shortcomings, provide us with most of the major data points on such matters.

One of the most complete compendiums of survey data can (easily) be found on the RealClearPolitics website. The surveys in its files go back to early 2009. And as can be seen from the results over more than seven years, the vast majority of the time, the vast majority of Americans have viewed the country as being on the “wrong track” as opposed to moving in the “right direction.” Since (again, according to polling data), conservatives remain far from a majority of all Americans, then obviously the wrong-trackers must include lots of moderates and liberals.

Another kind of important clue regarding the non-partisanship of major voter concerns that’s escaped Swaim’s notice: Bernie Sanders shockingly unexpected run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Does the author think that a self-identified Socialist from a tiny state would have come so close to unhorsing the Democratic establishment favorite Hillary Clinton if most of much of the American Left thought the country was doing swimmingly?

Swaim’s second goof is at least as bizarre. It’s his contention that the most sensible choice that voters can make this year is to bow to the inevitable. In Swaim’s words:

“A republic in decline doesn’t need a leader who will try to force its electorate to be something it isn’t, or who will insult and berate its leaders into doing things differently. What’s needed, rather, is… [s]omeone…who can manage the decline of a great nation without making things worse.”

To be fair, the ellipses I’ve stuck in the above quote represent text in which Swaim offers entirely legitimate criticisms of Trump’s candidacy, as well as the eminently reasonable hope for “someone who will stand against the excesses of modern liberalism without entertaining the vain hope of obliterating it….”

But if Swaim thinks that either conservatives or liberals or moderates are looking for a president whose top priority is presiding over more of the same, he’s either seriously delusional or – as is much more likely – so comfortably esconced in the nation’s chattering class bubble that he equates his own privileged position with that enjoyed by himself and his affluent peers. Come to think of it, that’s probably why the equally cloistered Washington Post believes these thoughts are worth presenting.

Im-Politic: The Establishment Keeps Doubling Down Against Populism

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2016 election, American politics, Ben Domenech, Bernie Sanders, Brexit, Donald Trump, establishment, Im-Politic, Jonathan Rauch, Populism, special interests, The Atlantic, The Federalist, think tanks, United Kingdom

Brexit underscores the belief that I have expressed throughout this presidential campaign cycle that opponents of the populist wave breaking all over the high income world have two basic choices: They can demonize the populists and their champions, or they can propose policies capable of addressing constructively the legitimate grievances of these voters. A lengthy article just posted on The Atlantic‘s website adds to the evidence that the American political establishment has overwhelmingly opted for choice number one.

Author Jonathan Rauch makes clear in his title how he interprets the rise of anti-establishment candidates like presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and unexpectedly strong Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders: “How American Politics Went Insane.” His explanation: Well-intentioned reformers across the nation’s ideological spectrum went way overboard in removing the flaws in the formal and informal political systems that on balance served the United States well for decades, and wound up proverbially throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Rauch is certainly correct in pointing out that various recent changes mandated in U.S. politics have backfired, or at the least had damaging unintended consequences. He’s also correct in noting that the results have too often strengthened extremist impulses and weakened their moderate counterparts.

But the author is completely off-base in claiming that all would be set right if the nation only recognized the dangers of the transparency and openness in government it’s insisted on, and resolved to return to the days when “institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees…historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time.”

As these intermediaries’ influence fades,” Rauch continues, “politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.”

Ben Domenech of The Federalist has written a wonderful takedown of Rauch’s establishmentarian bias. Especially devastating is his observation that the practitioners of “insider politics” – including “influence peddlers,” other types of “middle men,” and particularly the wealthy, entrenched special interests they served – used the system to enrich and empower themselves even further. In the process, of course, they left more and more of their compatriots on the outs.

Domenech could have gone even further, however, and pointed out that the author’s establishmentarian bias is actually self-serving. After all, Rauch is not only a regular contributor to establishment publications The Atlantic and National Journal. He’s a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a mainstay of a Washington, D.C. think tank world that, as I’ve written, has turned into a dedicated “idea laundering” machine – advancing the policy preferences of its corporate and other one-percent-er funders by cloaking them in quasi-academic, objective-looking garb.

But Domenech’s dispositive argument entails Rauch’s almost complete neglect of substance. Domenech calls Rauch’s thesis “bereft of data and thoroughly at odds with the data we have.” I’d emphasize the converse: Rauch is almost completely process-oriented – which of course reflects the establishment worldview that the major, strategic issues are all being handled just splendidly, and that the only remaining questions concern some mechanics.

Domenech does a nice job of listing the substantive establishment failures Rauch glosses over: in addition to Vietnam and Watergate, “Impeachment. 9/11. Iraq. Katrina. Congressional corruption. Financial meltdown….Stagnant wages.” (Domenech also includes Obamacare and the president’s “failed stimulus,” but in my view, those cases are far from screamingly obvious.)

It’s true that Rauch, and his defenders, can point out that for all those troubles and even crises, the United States is still chugging along, and that the vast majority of its citizens enjoy living standards that remain the envy of most of the rest of humanity. At the same time, it’s crucial to remember how many immense built-in advantages the United States has always enjoyed, including generally friendly and, more important, weak, neighbors; abundant natural resources; and a national creed that has encouraged wealth creation and equal opportunity (however often the latter has been absent for major groups).

That is, the United States remains immensely difficult to damage fatally both geopolitically and economically. In fact, given the record cited above – and the crucial policy mistakes were supported by mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike – the most important question raised by this year’s American political tumult arguably isn’t it’s reached such proportions. It’s what took so long.

Following Up: Brexit and American Politics

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2016 election, Bernie Sanders, Brexit, chattering class, Donald Trump, European Union, Following Up, globalization, Hillary Clinton, Immigration, Populism, United Kingdom

Maybe since I never thought it would happen, I never followed Brexit closely and never expected to write much about it. So much for those plans! Therefore, some of those great items I thought I’d be posting this weekend and early next week will head for the shelf. Here, instead, are some musings, focusing on the political effects in the United States – and that follow on from yesterday’s post.

>Although I remain confident that the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union will have scant impact on American politics this election year, some effects may rise above the trivial level. One has to do with an opportunity lost – by opponents of presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Had Britain opted for “Remain,” it’s certain that Trump critics throughout the political establishment would have rushed to proclaim that his brand of economic and political nationalism was dead politically as well as disastrous policy-wise. And it’s possible that these innumerable published and broadcast victory laps could have discouraged some Trump backers and reduced their turnout in November (all else equal). The torrent of scorn also could have convinced some independents and leaners to opt for a status quo champion like his presumptive November Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Converse effects, moreover, might have rippled through the Clinton and Clinton leaners camps. So in that sense, Brexit could represent a major dodged bullet for Trump-ism.

>Nonetheless, I remain just as strongly convinced that the Brexit victory won’t create any noteworthy positive momentum for Trump. Think of it this way: Can you imagine any Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders) supporters concluding anything on the order of “The British decided to leave the European Union. They were motivated largely by security-related immigration concerns, resentment to economic globalization, and a desire to preserve and reclaim their political sovereignty. Therefore, I should vote for Trump because his positions are similar”?

How about this version? “The British decided to leave the European Union…CONTINUE AS ABOVE through “political sovereignty,” and then conclude, “Therefore, I should vote for Trump because those similar positions of his are actually right.” Equally preposterous.

Or this version, “The British….political sovereignty” and then conclude, “Therefore, I should vote for Trump because I don’t want to be out of step with what might be a global wave.” Come on.

One slightly more plausible possibility: “The British…political sovereignty” and then conclude, “Therefore, I should vote for Trump because it would be best if the United States and the U.K. had leaders on the same wavelength.” Slightly – but not much more – conceivable.

Clearly visible here in all the commentary hailing or fearing a domino effect is the tendency – especially on the part of shortsighted, superficial pundits and politicians – to substitute catchy metaphors and facile talking points for thought. Sure, it sounds at first hearing plausible that elections overseas – especially in a country with close cultural and historical ties and resemblances to America – would produce “momentum” that influences U.S. voters for any of the reasons implied above. But when has that actually ever happened?

Just as important: Why in concrete, substantive terms would it? Here it’s especially important to remember both the economic and geopolitical gulf dividing the United States and the U.K. that I explained in my first Brexit post. Precisely because – despite all the tripe manufactured by the chattering classes about an interdependent world – the United States is so amply insulated against so many international developments, American voters, as I noted, generally aren’t even paying attention to the British decision, and rightly so.

Yes, the stock market turmoil, which could linger briefly, is focusing Americans’ attention. But for anyone who professes to be genuinely optimistic about America’s future economic prospects, there’s no reason to believe that Brexit per se will produce a lengthy stock slump. The most credible argument in this vein – and for Brexit shaping American election results – entails the British vote meaningfully reducing economic confidence around the world and increasing uncertainty, producing a big drop-off in business investment and therefore even slower growth. And Trump would figure to be the prime beneficiary of a U.S. economy that gets even worse.

But here we run into a real irony: Who can doubt that, rightly or wrongly, one of the biggest threats to (already weak) business confidence and investment these days is the prospect of a Trump victory? Trying to net out all the effects here – whether political or economic – has my head spinning. That’s always a good sign that it’s time to stop speculating.

Another decisive reality the refutes both the momentum hopes and fears: However many sovereignty-related concerns are justified by U.S. membership in international organizations (especially like the World Trade Organization, which is legally authorized to nullify American law), significant actual threats to the nation’s independence simply have not emerged. As a result, sovereignty-grounded political appeals can’t reasonably be expected to resonate very widely or deeply in the U.S. electorate.

By contrast, the European Union’s decisions had already been realities that the British have to live with every day. So it was always likely that the Brexit campaign would at least attract large-scale support.

>Finally, the American media and political classes do have one Brexit-related point right. It’s centered on policy, but could also affect the election. Although some pundits and politicians are attributing the “Leave” vote mainly to various combinations of nativism, xenophobia, racism, and the like, more appear to understand that the EU and its backers have made serious policy mistakes that, if not enough to justify the Union’s breakup, do require major reforms.

Throughout the current presidential campaign, Clinton has clearly voiced similar thoughts about Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ unexpectedly strong Democratic primary challenge, and has already pushed moved Left-ward on issues such as trade and Wall Street regulation, at least rhetorically. Clinton’s early responses to Brexit as such have been pretty muted. But it’s entirely possible that even if I’m right about Brexit’s impact on the domestic political fundamentals, Clinton might interpret the referendum and its implications as another sign that populism is the wave of the future in America, and that she has no choice but to ride it. Even in this astonishing political year, success along these lines would rank high on its list of political shocks.

Im-Politic: What if This Time It’s Really Different for Trump?

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2016 election, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, fascism, Gonzalo Curiel, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mexico, racism, Trade

Not that I have my finger on the pulse of public opinion, or even opinion in the political and media establishments I try to monitor, but the current Trump Moment strikes me as being different, and more serious politically than its predecessors.

You know which ones I mean. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s statement about Mexico sending criminals and rapists into the United States. His trashing of Arizona Republican Senator John McCain’s years as a Vietnam War POW. His statement that “There has to be some form of punishment” for women who undergo abortions. His proposal to ban foreign Muslims from entering the United States. His apparent mockery of a reporter with a physical disability.

Of course, these items by no means exhaust the list of outrageous or at least bizarre and/or unnerving Trump-isms. And their impact on his campaign so far seems to be negligible. But his allegation that Judge Gonzalo Curiel is incapable of presiding impartially over one of his Trump University trials because of his Mexican heritage appears to have touched off condemnations from his opponents and frustration among his supporters orders of magnitude greater than those sparked by previous remarks.

I have no idea if This Time It’s Different or not, but the current uproar prompted two thoughts I hope you agree are worth sharing. First, if by some jaw-dropping turn of events, Trump is forced out of the race or is denied the Republican nomination at the Cleveland convention by delegates overcome with buyers’ remorse, all serious talk of two major issues corroding the vitals of America’s economy and its politics almost surely comes screeching to a halt. I’m talking about trade and immigration.

Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has spent the entire campaign trying to out-pander her intra-party rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, as a champion of ever more reckless Open Borders policies. And her opposition to the next big job-killing trade agreement to come down the pike – President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has all the trappings of election-year expediency. In fact, in her foreign policy speech in San Diego last Thursday, the former Obama administration Secretary of State left little doubt that she’s chomping at the bit to revive the push for such offshoring-friendly globalization agreements. Why else would she take such pains to condemn Trump for seeking a “trade war with China” and dredging up the red herring about such moves materially worsening the Great Depression in the 1930s?

Sanders, of course, has staunchly opposed not only the TPP but all of its predecessors. So if Clinton’s irresponsible handling of classified information and/or damaging disclosures about her family foundation’s operations wind up derailing her candidacy, a bona fide trade policy critic would still be running for the presidency this fall. But as suggested above, Sanders has become as ardent an advocate of highly permissive immigration policies as any card-carrying member of the corporate cheap labor lobby. So the odds of American workers losing their livelihoods or suffering wage decline because of cheap or subsidized foreign competition could go down. But the odds of these harmful results coming from cheap domestic competition would stay high.

The second thought concerns all the allegations of demagoguery and fascism that have been leveled against Trump. I’m sure at least many are sincerely believed, even by some of the Never Trump Beltway Republican and conservative stalwarts. Few have expressed any problems with the at least equally dangerous and anti-democratic practices of making policy behind closed doors at gatherings of politicians and plutocrat lobbyists. All, however, have dusted off their European history books to insist how fragile the foundations of democracy can be at a time of widespread economic distress.

And yet the example of interwar Europe is revealing in ways the anti-Trump-ians either don’t recognize or don’t want to recognize. Those societies were not only devastated economically by depression and, in the case of Germany, hyperinflation. They had suffered losses during the Great War that are literally unimaginable for Americans (unless they immigrated from those countries at that time). And except in Britain, democracy’s roots were shallow or weak.

Economic times today unquestionably are hard for far too many Americans, but otherwise, the United States in no way fits the description of a country about to reject representative government or the rule of law. In fact, precisely because the national situation is so entirely manageable in comparison, it’s nothing less than striking that the avowed champions of democracy, who profess to be so terrified about the Trump-ist threat, have taken virtually none of the decidedly modest steps that surely would have sufficed to slow Trump’s momentum, possibly halt it altogether – and quash the danger for the time being.

Yes, Clinton has abandoned the TPP. But even many Democrats don’t believe her conversion will have legs. Yes, the Beltway Republicans and conservatives have jumped on the Border Security train. But their still heavy dependence on Big Business donations will surely tempt them to support a relatively permissive immigration reform bill shortly after the election – and as long before the next presidential cycle as possible. Moreover, their surrogates in the (corporate-funded) think tanks and the establishment media keep doubling down on their own arguments that returning to maximum trade liberalization and mass immigration are essential for varying combinations of partisan political, economic, and strategic reasons.

In fact, here’s a rule of thumb I feel pretty confident about. The more stridently these Democratic and Republican establishmentarians defend the trade and immigration status quos, the louder and more often they’ll condemn public anger and resentment as signs of incipient fascism.